The eating is good in this picturesque pocket of north-eastern Spain. The charming ancient city of Lleida, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, boasts a Michelin-starred restaurant and any number of holes in the wall specialising in traditional Catalan delicacies: peppery pork sausages called butifarra, snails cooked in their own juices, toasted bread rubbed with ripe tomato, garlic, salt and olive oil. When Neanderthals were living here 80,000 years ago, it wasn’t too bad, either.
They rustled up hearty meals of sustainably sourced, organic fare roasted over an open fire, letting the produce “speak for itself”, as an earnest young chef might say today. On the Neanderthal menu were turtle, rabbit, bison, wild horse when seasonally available, and possibly even a hunk of woolly rhinoceros. Yet this was no Garden of Eden.
The unsettled global climate meant this region could swing between balmy and frozen, and edible prey would come and go. That small numbers of Neanderthals managed to exist here at all meant they had to continually adapt their survival strategy. They were shrewd, resourceful and probably quite communicative – far more so than we Homo sapiens have traditionally assumed.
They had to be. They successfully roamed an often hostile planet for at least 300,000 years: no mean feat. In recent years, sophisticated ways of dating ancient fossils, diligent archaeologists and a stream of discoveries have upended what we thought we knew about Neanderthal humans – and t.